THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 239 



recognition should have been so tardy, and accus- 

 tomed thought so ineradicable on this point, when 

 we reflect that modes of tillage already existed so 

 totally and specifically different in action from all 

 horse-worked implements, as those both of the 

 Spade and its more ancient congener, the Hoe;* 

 and that the perpendicular and very effective action 

 of these manual tools, contrasted with the farm- 

 implements of draught, might have dimly suggested 

 the possible discovery of other means of cultivation 

 as different from all these as they were from each 

 other. Any one who had ever seen a nutmeg rasped 

 away into fine atoms against the armed surface of a 

 grater, or saw-dust scattered in heaps from timber 

 by the teeth of the circular saw, and could find 

 room in his imaginative faculty for the contempla- 

 tion of this mechanical process, side by side with 

 the agricultural fact that a seed-bed is only a layer 



* In the Southern Countries of Europe, as in Italy, Spain, 

 and Portugal, and in the offshoots of the latter Madeira 

 and Brazil, the Hoe is the almost exclusive implement of 

 ( manual ) tillage. The Spade is, originally, a form of the 

 Hoe, adapted to more northerly climates, where the moistness 

 of the soil increases the labor of cultivation by forbidding 

 the tread of the workman on the worked land, and obliges 

 him to stand on the " land-side " of the trench. 



